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She wrote it three times. She wanted it light. She wanted it to sound like a woman who was not at all thinking about the last time he’d been in this kitchen, fixing her cabinet door with a screwdriver out of his jacket pocket. She put a smiley face at the end, took it off, and put it back.

Dinner Thursday? I’m making soup, which I’m actually good at. That’s not me being modest, that’s just the truth.

Twenty minutes later her phone buzzed on the counter.

Busy week. Inventory.

She read it standing at the stove.

It wasn’t mean. It wasn’t anything, really. It was four words, and one of them was inventory. He ran a hardware store. It was December. Stores did inventory. People had busy weeks.

She typed No worries! Another time and added the smiley face, and that exclamation point took more out of her than anything she’d typed all day. It was her version of fine. She knew that even as she sent it.

She set the phone down. She stirred a pot on the stove that had nothing in it.

He’s busy, she told herself. That’s all.

She didn’t sleep well.

* * *

On Tuesday she saw him on the ladder.

She was walking home from school down Main Street with her bag over her shoulder, and there he was in Founders Square at the top of the tall ladder, winding white lights around the gazebo eaves, snow on his shoulders, his breath rising in the cold. Her whole heart lifted before she could stop it. It just went up, like something let go of a balloon.

She waved. She started across the street.

He looked at her.

And he nodded.

She knew that nod. It was the one you gave a stranger on her first day of school.

Then he turned back to the lights.

She stopped in the snow.

She stood there with her hand still halfway up, like a fool, long enough to feel the cold coming up through her boots. Long enough to understand that he wasn’t going to turn around.

She lowered her hand and went home.

* * *

She sat on her porch in the dark with her coat still on and didn’t go in.

It hurt worse than hi had. That was the thing she couldn’t get around. Hi had come from a man who hadn’t mattered in a long time. The nod had come from the man who mattered more than anything, and he had given it to her from the top of a ladder like she was nobody at all.

The old voice came back. And this time it came with evidence.

See? Here it is. Here’s the weather.

She called Lauren.

Lauren was on her porch in twelve minutes with a bottle of wine and a sweatshirt from a 5K she had definitely never run, and she sat down in the cold next to Allison without asking a single question, and Allison told her everything. Ryan. The hi. The wyd, hru, miss you. The wow ok. Blocking him. And then the soup and the inventory and the nod.

Lauren was quiet through all of it. Then she said, “I’m going to find Ryan.”

“You don’t know where he lives.”